7 Queen St., Londonderry

7 Queen Street, Londonderry

This is a Victorian mid-terrace three-storey townhouse with attic, built in 1847 on the west side of Queen Street, which runs between Great James Street and Clarendon Street on the west side of the River Foyle. It forms part of a terrace of eight similar houses and shares group value with its neighbours. The building sits within the Clarendon Street Conservation Area, to which it makes a significant contribution through its historic authenticity.

Architectural Description

The house is rectangular on plan, with its principal elevation facing east onto Queen Street. It is two bays wide and finished in smooth rendered painted render on a low rendered painted plinth. The roof is pitched natural slate with terracotta clay ridge tiles. A large rendered unpainted chimney stack with seven clay pots rises from the south side. Rainwater goods to the front elevation consist of uPVC guttering on a timber fascia board, while cast-iron half-round guttering on iron drive-through brackets is also recorded to the front elevation.

All window openings are square-headed and set on painted masonry sills. The ground-floor window bay does not align with the bays on the floors above, with a single window bay positioned to the right of the entrance doorway. Windows throughout are timber sliding sash, six-over-six panes, on all floor levels.

The entrance doorway is elliptical arch-headed and slightly recessed. It features engaged fluted columns of the Doric order to either side, a raised-and-fielded four-panel painted timber door, an entablature with dentilled cornice, and a webbed Adam-style fanlight above. The door opens directly from the pavement onto a tiled threshold.

The rear west elevation is three storeys in height with an unpainted cement rendered finish and a modern rooflight to the slated pitched roof. A two-and-a-half-storey rear return is also of unpainted cement render, with a single casement window at first floor level and a tall chimney with two clay pots.

The north and south sides abut the neighbouring properties at numbers 6 and 8 Queen Street respectively. To the rear is a small yard enclosed by a rendered wall.

Historical Context

Queen Street was laid out around 1840 as part of a remarkable period of urban expansion in Londonderry driven by rapid economic and population growth between 1825 and 1850. As the historian John Hume has noted, this period saw the reconstruction of buildings within the city walls alongside the first development of housing outside them, in areas including Bogside and Edenballymore. Queen Street was the second major new street in this part of the city, following Great James Street, which had been laid out around 1833.

The first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1830 records the Queen Street area as rural hinterland within the townland of Edenballymore, with the city's built fabric at that date extending no further than Waterloo Place, Abbey Street, and William Street. The only significant buildings north of the walls in the early 19th century were isolated institutional structures — the Londonderry Infirmary, the Lunatic Asylum, and Foyle College — with virtually no domestic architecture in the vicinity. The sole surviving earlier building in the area is Foyle Cottage, a Regency house constructed around 1815. Writing in 1847, Robert Simpson recorded in his Annals of Derry that the entire district later covered by Great James Street, William Street, Little James Street and their surrounding lanes had originally comprised open meadow ground without a single house.

The development of uniform three-storey terraced townhouses in this area established a new and fashionable quarter that quickly became the preferred address of the city's merchant and professional classes. The geometric street pattern of Clarendon Street, Great James Street, and Queen Street was characteristic of Georgian town planning and represented the most ambitious planning scheme undertaken in Londonderry since the construction of the walled city between 1613 and 1619.

O'Hagan's contemporary plan of 1847 records the street as Queen's Street and shows at least twelve houses built along it by that date, including number 7, which is depicted with a rear outbuilding that has since been demolished. The layout of numbers 1 to 8 Queen Street remained unchanged by the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1853, with no further buildings added in the intervening period.

Griffith's Valuation of 1856 records that numbers 1 to 8 Queen Street were leased to tenants by Thomas Major, a landowner residing in Creggan. Number 7 was valued at £21 — higher than most of the terrace owing to its additional out-offices — and was occupied at that time by a Miss Dorothea Steele, described in the Ulster Town Directories as a member of the nobility or gentry. Following Thomas Major's death in 1858, numbers 2 to 8 continued to be administered by his estate until the 1930s. By the end of the Annual Revisions, the value of number 7 had fallen to £17.

The 1911 Census of Ireland records the house as the home of Mr Samuel Craig, a veterinary surgeon, who described it as a second-class dwelling containing seven main rooms. The First Revaluation of 1935 records that ownership had passed to a Miss Clara Craig and that the value had been increased to £23. Neither the ownership nor the value had changed by the Second Revaluation of 1956 to 1972.

In 1978, the Department of the Environment designated the mid-19th-century streets and terraces as the Clarendon Street Conservation Area, defined as an area of special architectural or historic interest whose character it is desirable to preserve or enhance. Numbers 1 to 8 Queen Street were subsequently listed in 1980.

Writing in 2013, Calley described numbers 1 to 8 Queen Street as the earliest buildings along Queen Street, noting their smooth-rendered three-storey, two-bay form with deep-set square-headed window bays and round-headed doorways, diminished-scale second-storey bays, timber-framed doorways with Doric columns supporting dentilled entablatures and simple spider-web fanlights, retained glazing bars, and large deep chimneys, while acknowledging that their finishes had been altered over the years.

Alterations

Few of the mid-Victorian townhouses along Queen Street remain in residential use today; the majority have been converted into offices for dental, legal, and accountancy practices. Number 7 was converted from a private dwelling to office use in 1987. In 1991, a series of alteration works was carried out, including the construction of the current rear return, the re-slating of the roof, the replacement of the rainwater goods, and the rendering of the front and rear elevations. These alterations are noted as detracting from the building's architectural interest.